She had a faint smile and a tension that dared him to take her seriously, but was she serious?
“You’re dead right, chicken: nobody will believe you.”
“But I can prove it. I can. And it’s easy, anyone can do it who’s ever read a newspaper, seen a newsreel at the moving picture show. Anyone who learned their history lessons at school.”
“What?” This whole conversation was the set-up for an insult to his intelligence. “Can you possibly be talking about who I think you’re talking about? That stuffed suit the royals haul out for parades! That dressmaker’s dummy! That moth-eaten remainder from a waxwork museum! What the hell has come over you?” His gaze was caught again by her portfolio. “Oh, Lucy. Lucy, no. This is your life’s work? This is what you’ve been chasing after all this time?”
She looked down as if she were surprised to see the battered folio case on the table. Her cheeks were flushed and her smile had fled; he felt a stab of shame, as if he’d been picking on the slow child at school; but all the same!
“Of all the dull corners of history you could have chosen,” he said before he could change tack. “Well, all right. But please don’t suggest the Marshal of Whatsisname is news. Really, old darling, believability is not the issue. Sheer, unadulterated boredom is the issue.”
“Didn’t you ever scare yourself with the stories when you were a child?” Her voice was quiet, and though there was a humorous quirk to her brows she didn’t meet his eyes. “The end of an empire, the end of an age. The end of magic. And the one who did it just goes on and on . . . ”
“I know. ‘Don’t stay out after dark, he might get you!’ But that was just to make staying out after dark more fun.” Studying her face, Graham found himself increasingly sorry for his scorn. She always looked delicate; at this moment she looked frail. “I still don’t get what this is about? The story no one will believe?”
“Magic is still alive,” she said, almost in a whisper. “And I can prove it.”
“All right. What’s your proof?”
“The Marshal of Kallisfane.”
“But he ended it.” He leaned forward, as if it was important to convince her. “He brought the dread empire down and put an end to magic. Hurray for the dawn of reason and the rule of law.”
“A thousand years ago.”
“Give or take.”
“Then what’s keeping him alive?”
“What . . . ” Graham scratched his chin. He was on the verge of laughter, because though it was nonsense, it was clever nonsense. “Well, he’s a remnant, isn’t he? Sort of . . . a leftover. Wasn’t it supposed to be the doing of it, whatever he did, that preserved him? Dried prunes, salt cod, the Marshal of Whatsisname?”
“Are you asking me, or telling me?”
“I am telling you,” he said pompously, “what they taught us in school.”
But the more he tried to jolly her out of it, the more solemn she became.
“That,” she said with one of those direct, heartstopping looks, “is what he told someone a long time ago.”
“There you are, then.”
“And he’s a reliable source, is he? Mister Newspaperman?”
“Oh, come on!” He was stung by her echo of his scorn. “It’s clever, I grant you, but you don’t think you’re the first person ever to think of it, do you?”
“No,” she said, her gaze falling again to her papers. “No, I don’t.”
“Even if it’s a neat bit of logic, it doesn’t go anywhere, does it? I mean, so what if he is . . . ” (he felt like an ass for saying the word) “ . . . magical. If he’s the only magical thing in the world, what’s it good for? He’s an anomaly, the exception that proves the rule.”
“That just means ‘tests the rule’. The challenge to the rule. Did you know that?” This, apparently to the portfolio.
“And it’s no kind of newspaper story,” he forged on, though he was starting to hate the sound of his own voice. “You do know that, right?”
“Oh, yes. I know. Because no one will believe it, and no one will care.”
“Well, listen . . . ” By this time feeling like an utter shit. “There’s nothing wrong with the idea. I mean, as an idea. Philosophy, history, all that. Very profound.”
“Rest easy, my hero. I wasn’t going to ask you to put it in your paper.”
She smiled, finally, but she didn’t quite met his gaze. And then before he knew it she was gathering up the weighty portfolio and bending down to kiss him, which she never did, a press of her lips to the corner of his mouth, a gesture as mysterious and expressive of any of hers, warm and sad and what? What is this, Lucy? What the hell is this?
But by the time it occurred to him simply to ask, she was gone.
Lucy had called up Graham with the vague notion of asking for help, or perhaps for less than that, for comradeship, a shoulder braced against her own. So his contempt stung, and confused her, too, because she could have argued against it, but what if he was wrong? What if the danger was real? It was real, it was the crooked backward course she had been plotting all this time. So if she was wrong, if she had been chasing nothing more than a scholar’s delusion, then she was a fool, but she was safe. And if she wasn’t wrong, then he was safe, because she had taken her proof away unshared. And wasn’t it just a dream? She didn’t know. She could not explain the certainty of danger, even to herself. She went home.
And walking from the bus stop (the bus easier than hunting for a cab so close to noon) she turned the corner into the square and saw him.
Him.
Benbury Square was really three squares nested one inside the other: the outer square of townhouses; then the square of cobblestone pavement fronting the houses; then the square of the central garden, hemmed in by palings and punctuated by trees. There were beds of turned earth, two benches awaiting this year’s coat of paint, and a rounded patch of lawn already showing green. And on the lawn stood a man wearing a double-breasted overcoat of the sober, fashionless type favored by royalty. As Lucy had said to Graham, one saw this figure sometimes in the newsreels: herky-jerky frames of celluloid gray, at once luminous and drab, of the king opening the High Court or greeting a Special Envoy, with this stiff dark figure in the background. Stuffed suit, waxwork dummy, museum mannequin waiting for his armor. He stood so dreadfully still on the greening lawn. Watching Lucy’s house.
Lucy drifted backwards, taking a glacial age to slip back around the corner. She felt transparent as a ghost, as if her substance had been stripped by shock, leaving nothing but the damp gray chill of the day. She drifted, and even around the corner she could feel him, as if she were a compass and he, black as iron, were a magnetic pole. Still walking backwards, she was jostled by a passer-by, and suddenly the world leapt into existence: not a ghostly arena hushed with anticipation, but a living city, busy with pedestrians, motor cabs squawking their horns and delivery-van horses clattering on metal-shod hooves.
She ran until she could not breathe around the stitch in her side.
She rode a bus until the conductor turned her off at the end of its route, and then she rode another one.
She did not know where to go. The very concept of hiding was equivocal, denying as it did her passage from there to here. Hadn’t her feet pressed all that ground? Didn’t the tires of the bus? Wasn’t there a trail?
Hadn’t he, even he, left a trail?
The buses all seemed to turn her back towards the center of the city. After a bit she realized this was no arcane conspiracy, it was simply the logic of transportation: where else would the buses go? But getting off was hard. She looked anxiously through the dusty windows, expecting that stiff, dark, figure; or if not that, then the rumored black motorcars of the Regiment No One Ever Saw.
There were black cars, but they were only taxicabs. She hoped. She dared. She descended the high steps onto the curb and found herself in a neighborhood she knew, the politely shabby territory behind the national library, realm of scholars and writers, private librari
es and obscure museums, bookstores and cafés. She was known here. She could not possibly go to ground here. But her feet were on pavement they knew, and they took her to one of the smaller train stations in the city where she bought a ticket for a slow suburban train leaving in half an hour.
Half an hour. A terrifying gulf of time.
She sat, her feet throbbing in her not very sensible shoes, and watched the suburban shoppers flock and scatter like pigeons. She eyed the crippled clock above the ticket booth that refused to move its hands any faster than a creep. She studied the Departures board, looking for the hundredth time for a train that left any sooner. Which means that she must have look at that one word a hundred times before she saw it. Palton. A country town, one stop among many, so why did it swim slowly up into her consciousness like a fish rising to the hook? Palton, Palton . . .
Palton, where only last week two teachers had been dismissed to cover up the “hysteria” amongst the students of a country school. Palton, that lay tucked under the haunted peak of Breadon How. Palton, that was only a crow’s flight away from the castle at Denbreath.
It was like finding a path in the trackless wood. She had somewhere to go.
The last thing Lucy expected was to fall asleep on the train, but that was what she did, all but resting her head on the shoulder of the plump girl who had entered the compartment with a bevy of aunts just as the train pulled away. While they clucked over their parcels Lucy slipped gently into the murmur of voices, the swaying of the carriage, the rhythm of the wheels. Outside the window the city peeled away, diminishing into low brick districts, into gray waste grounds, into greening suburbs half-veiled by the engine’s steam. The train’s whistle shrieked at crossings and hooted for stations like a huge iron owl. Lucy half-slept while the train was in motion, half-woke when it crawled into one station and the next. The ladies left in a flurry of packages and she had the compartment to herself until a young man looked shyly in.
“Do you mind, miss?”
“No,” she said. He had a plain, open face, and an old raincoat slung over an off-the-rack suit that gave an impression of untidiness despite the bright polish of his enormous black shoes. Perhaps it was just that men of a certain size shouldn’t wear suits: he wasn’t fat, but he was very large. He gave Lucy a nervous smile and tucked himself away behind a paperback book that looked small in his hands. She relaxed a little; yet as the train rolled on, she began to find the racketing rhythm of the wheels more implacable than soothing. To Palton to Palton to Palton and what was she going to do when she got there? Something, she thought with her hands clenched into sharp-knuckled fists. Something to oppose. Something to defy.
Unable to sit still, she got up and slid open the door to the corridor. The countryside spread over brown fields and grey-green trees to the dusky northern hills. The smoke of burning thatch rose to meet the end of the day, drawing down the clouds. Lucy leaned against the corridor window, feeling a hard, old-woman’s sadness that seemed like the older sister to her fear, as if part of her knew that things weren’t going to turn out well. To defy, yes, that seemed necessary. That did not mean that she, knowing what she knew, could hope to overcome. She thought of the books scattered throughout her grandfather’s library. She thought of her grandfather, and her mother, and Graham. She thought of the hasty letter she had written, and of the papers she had abandoned to the care of the Left Luggage Office of Skillyham Station, and of the claim check that had gone into the post just as the train was called.
A woman swaying down the corridor to the end of the carriage excused herself as she bumped into Lucy. Lucy pressed herself aside, and through the window of the compartment’s glass door she caught the eye of the large young man with the book, who was watching her as patiently and unfeelingly as the fox watches the brush pile, waiting for the hare.
My hero,
Here is the story no one wants to know:
218 years ago, the Marshal of Kallisfane founded Madrigal College’s Chair of Imperial Studies, the only one in that subject in the university. Since the founding, there have been twenty-nine Fellows, as compared to an average of sixteen Fellows in the same period of time across all other subjects. Of those twenty-nine Fellows, only six in 218 years have died peacefully of old age. Three have simply disappeared—the rest have died of suicide, unexplained accident, or outright murder. Check the university records and local police blotters: this is fact. Also ask yourself: Why is there only one fellowship in Imperial History, when we are, today, living in the ruins of that empire? In the university, it is because every time another such fellowship has been proposed—even when the proposal includes generous funding—the University Council has declined. The only reason ever offered: such a chair already exists. Never mind that six different colleges sport research chairs in Modern History. There shall only ever be one chair in Imperial History, and the scholars who hold that chair are more likely to die violently than if they joined the army or worked in a mine . . .
They waited until she stepped off the train in Palton.
The large young man, with his book in his coat pocket, followed her onto the platform and was joined by an older man, thin enough to hide in his shadow, who materialized out of the engine’s steam.
“Please, Miss Donne,” said the older man as he took her elbow, “let’s not have a fuss.”
They didn’t have a fuss. It was exactly as though she had been met by friends. The large young man took her pocket book and rifled through it, but he did it so calmly no one seemed to notice. The ticket collector took Lucy’s ticket from his hand without a flicker and they walked out into the astonishing freshness of the spring evening. There was the cobbled street of the country town, the sketch of chimney pots against the violet sky. The air was impossibly sweet after the stuffiness of the train. Instinct made Lucy look up, but clouds hid the stars. Looking down she saw the massive shape of the long black car pulling up to the station door. There was something inevitable about that car, about the dusk, about the country quiet pouring in around the wail of the departing train. She drew a long breath with a strange kind of eagerness. Whatever else happened, she was going to know.
“That’s right, Miss Donne,” said the older man as he opened the rear door. “Nothing to be frightened of here.”
. . . But it isn’t only scholars he is keeping under his thumb. Seventy-two years ago the village of Galburgh in South Pevenshire was digging up a section of the commons at the edge of the village to widen a carriage road. In the course of the work they uncovered a stretch of old paving which, when it was taken up, proved to cover a spring that drained into the Macklebrook via an underground channel. There was some debate, reported in the parish records, as to whether to cover the spring and carry on with the road or to leave it uncovered and put it to some use. In the meantime, however, workmen who drank from the spring complained of dreams of such terrible import that one man joined an overseas missionary society and another committed suicide. The parish priest called upon the bishop for advice, but no church action was ever taken, for the simple reason that that was the month in which the Crown passed the Commons Development Act which allowed, and still allows, the sale of common land by parish councils for the “creation or development of such industries, enterprises, public buildings, etc, to the benefit of the township.” The commons was bought, the spring was paved over, and a new village police station built on the spot. According to the Pevenshire newspapers of the time, the Marshal of Kallisfane was on hand for the new station’s official opening.
Graham, the king overturned a common-use law of centuries’ standing so that the Revenant could pave over a spring and put it under guard. And that is one of the most harmless stories that comes to mind . . .
The motorcar slid down narrow country roads, carrying Lucy into the night. Lucy’s companion from the train shared the back seat with her, but with the darkness to hide his watchful gaze he was just the shy young man abashed by his own size, and then even less than that, as if he were absorb
ed into the car itself, just one more shade of dark. The air was chill, whistling with drafts, but it smelled warmly of tobacco and leather, leaf-mold and aging upholstery. Lucy was reminded of being chauffeured from school to her grandfather’s country house, always knowing that the man behind the wheel reckoned she was no more than an excuse to take the new car, hand-built in her grandfather’s own stable, out for a drive. She had never minded that feeling. It had been the real holiday between the heated friendships and rivalries of school and the equally perilous attentions of her mother, her cousins, her aunts. Tonight, as the wind whined in around the windows and the chill soaked through her sensible tweed, she felt as though she were wrapped in a ghost of that comfort. But while she acknowledged that ghost, she did not let it fool her. In the end, she thought, it was just the calm certainty of doom.
. . . for he is rarely inclined to hold his hand. Consider the fishers of Belmouth, who only two years ago complained of seals with human voices wrecking their nets and stealing their fish, but paying for their plunder with prophecy and song. The Marshal of Kallisfane, according to your very own newspaper, was granted use of the royal yacht for a late-autumn cruise ending in Belmouth harbor. Captain Ellerby, master of the king’s yacht, reported cloudless skies, light breezes, and an easy sail. That same day, the entire fishing fleet of Belmouth was lost in a freak storm. We will never know if it was because those fishermen were telling stories of talking seals, or if it was because of what those seals were saying. Every man off those boats is presumed drowned. Fifty-seven men . . .
The black motorcar of the Unnamed Regiment paused just long enough for an iron gate to swing open. They eased past a saluting sentry and onto a drive. It was late. They had traveled much further than Denbreath. Trees flickered in the edge of the headlamps’ glow, then fell away into blackness and an impression of rough ground. The car’s note deepened as it began to climb. Then even the ground fell away, and Lucy’s heart stopped for an instant of disoriented terror—but they were not flying, only following the back of a ridge, its steep slope invisible in the dark. That moment of fear lingered, a quickening in her belly and a tightening in her flesh, prelude to the shock of arrival.
At the Edge of Waking Page 12
